Bertie Ahern and the Irish Banana Republic

Then Taoiseach Charles Haughey with Bertie Ahern in 1992 

They used to call Bertie Ahern the Teflon Taoiseach.  You could throw plenty of mud at him but it none of it would ever stick.

Well, that's all changed now after the publication last week of the tribunal of inquiry into corruption in planning here.

The Mahon Tribunal -- named after the judge who was chairing it -- found that former Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Ahern had repeatedly lied about the source of £215,000 Irish pounds in cash that passed through his bank accounts in the 1990s.  The tribunal report said that it did not believe Ahern's statements that the money was a series of loans or presents from friends.

The tribunal rejected Ahern's various explanations regarding his personal finances during the period when he was minister for finance, including his claims that his friends had arranged the "dig-outs" because he was in financial difficulty after his marriage breakdown and separation.

Despite finding that Ahern's explanations about the source of the various cash lodgments into his bank accounts were "untrue,” the tribunal stopped short of describing him as corrupt. This allowed Ahern to claim over the weekend that the tribunal had not found that he had received any "corrupt payments."  But this is something of a technicality.

To prove corrupt payments here you must be able to prove not only that the politician was given money, but that he did something in return for it.  In the case of Ahern, the tribunal was able to find a series of unexplained payments, but the source of them and whether anything was ever done in return for them remains a mystery.

The true source of the funds, and whether or not they had been corrupt payments, could not be determined because Ahern had not told the truth about his finances, the tribunal said.

And that's about it. After sitting for 15 years at a total cost -- once all the legal bills are in -- of an estimated  € 300 million, the tribunal has told us more or less what we already knew -- Bertie Ahern was on the take.

It was small scale stuff, £30,000 here and £20,000 there.  After a forensic trawl through his bank accounts over 20 years or more the total amount of possibly dodgy money that the tribunal was able to uncover added up to a maximum of £215,000 (it's so long ago we still had the Irish pound at the time).

Think about it.  The Irish taxpayer has to pay out around  € 300 million to find out that Ahern got the equivalent of around  € 250,000 in payments that cannot be explained.  

To the simple question, "Was it worth it?" the answer must be no.  Not only has it taken an incredible 15 years and caused a lot of time wasting and disruption, the tribunal has failed to uncover the kind of major corruption that might have justified its existence for so long and at such expense.

The only people who are happy, as usual, are the lawyers. The tribunal has made the leading lawyers
involved multi-millionaires, with the top people getting between  € 3 and  € 5 million each.  It fact the tribunal created a total of 17 lawyer millionaires during its time.

It was not Bertie Ahern who was exposed in the report, of course.   A long litany of petty corruption involving senior and junior figures in Fianna Fail was uncovered going back over the years.

It was widespread through the system here in a way usually associated only with banana republics in South America or Africa or in a European country like Greece where bribes and kickbacks are normal.

We used to think that Ireland was better than this.  Now we know officially that we are as bad as the rest of them.

Part of this had to do with Fianna Fail being in power for so long.  As the saying goes, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Fianna Fail had close to absolute power for so long that it was almost inevitable that corruption would creep in.

This was aggravated by the planning system here which allowed local politicians to overturn decisions taken by planners deciding on construction projects.  The votes of local politicians could be bought for a thousand or two, ensuring the green light for developments that were often worth tens of millions.

Some local politicians from other parties were also involved. But it was mainly Fianna Fail.  For bigger developments you needed to get bigger political names behind you, and so some senior Fianna Fail figures were part of what was going on.  

The sad truth is that Ireland was not just corrupt, but corrupt at the heart of the political system.  And Fianna Fail was at the center of it.

Maybe we should not be so surprised.  After 800 years of occupation, we have only recently (about 90 years ago) emerged as a free country allowed to rule ourselves.
We may snigger at some African countries where the elite, once they get into power, use their position to enrich themselves.  Now it seems we may not be all that different.

The Fianna Fail party has always regarded itself as having a special place in Irish life, often claiming to embody the nation.  In its early years, particularly in de Valera's time, the party was almost puritanical in its approach.

Private wealth was seen as less important than the task of building the new nation and leading a simple and moral (i.e. Catholic) life.  In de Valera's Ireland, the comely maidens lived happily in cottages on little farms and danced barefoot at the crossroads.  

But it was never that simple.  Even then, de Valera was accumulating wealth for himself as he used the donations of thousands of little people, mainly in America, to take control and effective personal ownership of the Irish Press Newspaper Group.  So even Dev was not so pure.

But the rot really set in when Charlie Haughey was taoiseach in the 1980s.  By then Fianna Fail was the party of the "mohair suit men" and had become the nexus of politics, business and construction.

To get things done, you went to certain people in the party with brown envelopes stuffed with cash.   The culture of "fixers" was endemic in Fianna Fail, and the one learning at Haughey's feet was his political heir apparent and Finance Minister Bertie Ahern.

An earlier tribunal has shown that Haughey was on the take on a massive scale, with millions involved. Although he had no income other than his pay as a politician he lived the grand lifestyle of a wealthy squire, paid for by businessmen who wanted to "get things done."

Ahern was never on that scale.   In comparison, what he was taking was pocket money.  That is evident in the size of the small house he lives in and the fact that he has no sign of any accumulated wealth, no big cars, or yachts, or racehorses or country estates.

For what amounts to chicken feed, Ahern has now been disgraced and humiliated.  Despite his achievements on peace in the North, few people here have any sympathy for him, largely because of the way he promoted the boom economy that has now collapsed and cost us our economic sovereignty.

Ironically, it was Ahern's first government that established this tribunal back in 1997.  Officially called the Tribunal of Inquiry into Certain Planning Matters and Payments, it was known as the Flood Tribunal then, under its first chairman, a retired High Court judge.  It was set up to investigate planning corruption in Dublin from the mid-1980s because of revelations that bribes were being paid to local politicians to rezone land for developers.  

When Judge Flood retired, Judge Mahon took over.  Finally, after 15 years, 917 sitting days and a likely total bill of  € 300 million the tribunal has come to an end, with a report that is 3,270 pages long.

It reveals dodgy behavior by former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds and Minister Padraig Flynn, among others.
But it is mainly Ahern who has been left to carry the corruption can.

He only has himself to blame.  His efforts to explain where he got the money were pathetic; at one point he even used the hoary old excuse that he won some of it on the horses!

An example is one lot of Ahern's money, which appeared to have an American connection.  This was for a bank deposit of £28,772.90 on a particular day in 1994.  The odd pennies at the end seemed to indicate that this must have been a round figure in foreign currency which had been converted into Irish money.  

Ahern told the tribunal that it was 30,000 in British pounds (sterling) which he had been given by one of his friends from Manchester.  But the trouble was that when the tribunal examined the bank records for the day in question, it found that the bank branch had taken in less than 2,000 sterling that day.

However, the bank's buy rate for U.S. dollars that day, if it was applied to a deposit of $45,000, would have produced exactly £28,772.90, the exact amount that had been deposited into Ahern's account.

Does someone over there know something we don't?

A Dublin St. Patrick’s bah humbug

Hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Dublin on Saturday to watch the St. Patrick’s Day parade 

Like a lot of people here, I don't get excited by St Patrick's Day anymore. And this one was no different.

Myself and my better half put on our rain gear (it's the law here -- it always rains on St. Patrick's Day) and went for a long walk up the beach and around the fishing harbor near where we live.  We were not wearing anything green and we didn't have a leaf of shamrock between us -- and it didn't feel like we were missing something.    

The day before, the harbor had been full of tourists -- it's close to Dublin -- including a lot of American teenagers with their leprechaun hats and orange beards, and some even in the full outfit with shiny green jackets and trousers. Most likely they were from the marching bands that come over from U.S. colleges every year.    

On the big day, as I said, we walked around the harbor and down the pier in peace with not a tourist in sight, which was kind of a holiday in itself.  At the same time the kids from the American college bands would have been marching down O'Connell Street, delighting the crowds as they tooted and quick-stepped and the cheerleaders high kicked and shivered in the cold wind.

It was different when our own kids were small, of course.  Then it was into town early to get a good position for the parade.  We even had a mini stepladder in case we could not get a spot near the front.

We always had something green on (my sons wore their Irish soccer tops and my daughter her special green ribbons) as well as our St. Patrick's Day badges and big sprigs of shamrock.  We drew the line at flags and leprechaun hats -- even the kids knew they were just for the tourists.

It's still mainly a day for kids here and I have no problem with that.  But the rest of it I can leave -- the drunk teenagers, the urinating in public, the throwing up, the abandoned half eaten fast food and the canned Irish traditional music blaring out of loudspeakers over the doors of the bars.

And I no longer want to see adults who should know better outside pubs in the afternoon with pint glasses in their hands singing “The Fields of Athenry” and waving giant shamrocks made in China.

By nighttime, when the kids are home in bed, some parts of Dublin on St. Patrick's night too often resemble that Urban Outfitters t-shirt.  Remember that clichés and stereotypes come into existence because they reflect a reality.

It may not be the whole reality but there's more than a grain of truth there, which is why some people here get angry about how we are portrayed.

Not me, however.  I've been down Temple Bar on St. Patrick's night and New Year's Eve and other big nights often enough to have lost all my political correctness about the Irish.  

Maybe I'm getting old and grumpy and maybe I've seen it all too often before. But it seems to me these days that St. Patrick's Day is now a completely manufactured event, a group hysteria of forced gaiety fueled by booze.  It's a celebration that no longer has any idea what it's actually celebrating.  

These days St. Patrick's Day seems to have little to do with being Irish. It certainly does not reflect the Irish people I know, the way they live, what they think, who they are, how they see themselves, even how they enjoy themselves.  Most of them, if they told the truth, would admit that it's almost an embarrassment.

Talking of things that are embarrassing, are you okay with the idea of turning Niagara Falls green for the day?  And the Leaning Tower of Pisa?  And all the other international landmarks that were turned green this year?

Doesn't anyone have any sense of proportionality anymore?  We're a tiny island hanging off the western edge of Europe. Why is Irishness being inflicted on countries around the globe?

Well, I hear you say, it's because there are Irish people everywhere and wherever we are they love us and they love our culture and they want to be Irish for a day.  

And it's not just the present generation of emigrants. We've been emigrating for so long and in such numbers that our descendants now make up significant parts of the populations in many countries, particularly in Britain, the U.S., Canada and Australia.  That's why in so many cities around the globe last weekend bands were marching and people were wearing silly hats, singing “Irish” songs and drinking too much.

For the descendants of Irish emigrants -- and the Irish diaspora has been estimated at 70 million people -- it's a chance to proclaim their ancestry and identity.  For everyone else, it's a reason to party, a legitimate excuse for consuming more beers than they can handle.  

There is another side to it, of course, which although not entirely cynical is not completely innocent either.   It's the way we exploit St. Patrick's Day for all we can get out of it.  

So hotel prices here go up for the holiday and pubs push up the price of the traditional pint of the black stuff, and restaurants shamelessly churn out bowls of Irish stew and plates of bacon and cabbage that they would not dare put on their menus for the rest of the year.  (Some places here even serve up corned beef, even though 95% of Irish people today have no idea what it is.)  

St. Patrick's Day is big business.  I saw some guy from the Irish Hotels organization on TV last weekend saying this year it was giving a €50 million boost to the country.  He said that, despite the bad publicity about our economy, Ireland was "trending" in international tourism.  

Don't you love the jargon?  He didn't say that the recession has pushed our prices down and that is helping to boost our tourism, but that's probably what he meant.

Abroad on St. Patrick's Day it's the same story.  Our government ministers fan across the globe, and for them
it's not so much a celebration of being Irish as a hard sell trade mission.

They don't even try to hide it anymore. We'll give you Bono and the craic, you send us industries to create jobs, that's the deal.  We'll even throw in a few pints and loads of diddley eye music as well for free.      
There's no end to the hype and the riverdancing.  The international phenomenon that St. Patrick's Day has become in 2012 is quite extraordinary.  

On radio here a few days ago I heard an Irish ballad group being interviewed from some remote city in China (I can't spell it and you've never heard of it) where they were tuning up for a huge Irish celebration on the big day.   Irish dancing is wildly popular in Ukraine.   And in Russia Irish traditional music is huge.

By chance as I was flicking through satellite channels on TV a few nights back I paused at RT (the English language Russian Television station) to see a pub scene that looked like somewhere in Woodside on Paddy's night with Guinness, green hats and a full on party in progress, except that it was downtown Moscow. And from the accents it was clear that they were all Russian.

What is it with these people?  I reckon the Irish diaspora in Russia and Ukraine is miniscule.

Russian and Ukrainian folk music and dancing are wonderful, so what's the big attraction of the Irish version?  I'd bet that many of the Russians letting off steam in that “Irish” bar in Moscow on Paddy's night know little if anything about Ireland, including exactly where it is, and they would find it hard to name an Irish person other than Bono.  

There is one simple explanation to all this and it goes back to the Urban Outfitters slogans.  St. Patrick's Day, whether we like it or not, has now become a kind of international symbol for an “Irish” party, complete with silly hats and buckets of beer.

It's a free pass for people everywhere to lose their worries and inhibitions for a day of freedom during which everybody can get a bit mad, a bit drunk and let their hair down.  So people across the globe, including people who really don't know much about either Ireland or St. Patrick, go for it.

In the British, American, Canadian and Australian contexts, it's more connected with reality because the diaspora factor is genuinely important.  This is particularly true in the case of the U.S., despite all the green beer, Kiss Me I'm Irish t-shirts and boozed up leprechauns in “Irish” bars on the big day.  

Writing in The Irish Times last week, Professor James Flannery from Emory University in Atlanta made some interesting points about the Paddy's Day phenomenon in the U.S. and the way it has spread much wider than the traditional Irish communities there.  

He explained that for 19th century post-Famine Irish emigrants, the St. Patrick's Day celebration became a public way for them to claim their place as American citizens in the face of widespread prejudice and discrimination.

The Irish were the first ethnic group to achieve success in the US, Flannery wrote, and for the Italians, Jews, Poles, etc. who followed they became a model of what could be achieved.  For that reason St. Patrick's Day became a holiday that meant something to all the immigrant groups.  

Over time it became a holiday that honored all the diverse peoples who contributed to America and it was something that everyone could celebrate.

In that sense, as Flannery explains it, there are valid, historical reasons why St. Patrick's Day was embraced by immigrant groups other than the Irish.  It symbolized the acceptance of the rights of all immigrant groups and acknowledged their roles in building America.  

To put it another way, it explains why everyone in America wants to be Irish for the day, and why anyone can wear a Kiss Me I'm Irish t-shirt.

These days probably very few of the non-Irish in the U.S. understand why St. Patrick's Day seems to belong to everyone.  They just enjoy it.  And that's okay.

In a strange way, it all probably means more to non-Irish people these days, in America and elsewhere, than it does to the Irish here in the homeland.  And that's okay too.

The line of shame - thousands of unemployed Irish get in line to get out of Ireland

The Overseas Jobs Fair in Dublin two weekends ago attracted thousands of Irish

No doubt you will have seen the pictures last week of the long line of people queuing to get into the Overseas Jobs Fair in Dublin. Effectively they were lining up to get out of Ireland.

It's a shameful thing, when you think about it. But the shame is not theirs.

The shame belongs to the politicians, senior civil servants, bankers and speculators who got this country into the mess it is in.

Inside the fair were exhibition stands with staff from companies in countries like Canada and Australia where they have shortages of skilled workers in all kinds of areas from cow milkers to carpenters, plumbers to painters, truck drivers to teachers.

Outside, the line started early, hours before the exhibition was due to open.

The organizers were taken by surprise at the scale of the demand, with 15,000 or so people turning up.
Eventually, as the day wore on, people in the second half of the line were told they had no hope of getting in. I heard one young woman who had driven up from Waterford being interviewed on radio. She had left home at five that morning.

Now she was going home again, without even getting in to see what was on offer and where. But she didn't sound bitter or angry, just resigned.

That's what being out of work for a couple of years does -- it beats the spirit out of you.

The Overseas Jobs Fair was happening in the RDS, the Royal Dublin Society's huge exhibition center and showjumping arena, just south of the city center. In another part of the complex, at the same time, there was another event taking place, the ard fheis (annual convention) of Fianna Fail. Such irony.
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Outside the RDS there were thousands of people lining up to get a job somewhere overseas. Inside, in another part of the complex, the political party which had ruined the economy was in session.

Outside, those in the jobs line looked worn out and depressed. Inside, Bertie Ahern was grinning away, shaking hands. Brian Cowen stood sheepishly to acknowledge applause.

The party delegates and members from all over the country - over a thousand of them -- were determined to show that, whatever about the mistakes of the past, the party is far from dead.

The new leader of Fianna Fail Micheal Martin, at least, had the good grace to sound embarrassed by the situation and to say sorry. He said he regretted the errors of the past, but he was focused on the future.

And there is such anger out there among ordinary people at the scale of the cutbacks in state spending that Fianna Fail could be back sooner than anyone thinks. As time passes the new government will be blamed for the cutbacks, not the old government.

At least Fianna Fail are contrite. Which is far better than being smug, which the present government manages to be in spite of the situation the country faces.

The present government has nothing to be smug about. Granted they inherited an economic nightmare, but their attempts to grapple with the situation and take the hard decisions have been unconvincing.

Last week they were a year in office and they have little to show for it. Over the past year they have failed to stand up to the vested interests here -- from the state sector unions to the wealthy professional groups -- and have instead squeezed the easy targets, mainly the middle class private sector people who can't defend themselves.

Last year, for example, the government put a new tax on private sector pension funds to pay for a new jobs initiative. This particularly sneaky tax will suck hundreds of millions out of private pensions this year, even though a lot of these pension funds are already in trouble.

The government wanted to be seen to be doing something about the 14% unemployment rate, but they can't get any money for their jobs schemes thanks to the new fiscal rules imposed by the EU and the IMF. So they raided private pension funds.

And how many jobs have been created by this initiative? None, of course.

In spite of what the Labor Party thinks, governments can't create jobs. The money has vanished into the black hole of general state spending.

The only policy this new government appears to have is a relentless positivity, an insistence that we have turned the corner, that we're not Greece, that we're on the path to recovery.

The line of people queuing to get into the Jobs Overseas Fairs in Dublin and Cork last week exposed just how wrong that view is.

Our economy is a mess, and thousands of bright young people are leaving the country every month because they feel there's no future for them here.

Meanwhile, the government is radiating sunshine as though everything is fine.

Instead of taking bold decisions to tackle the size and expense of the state sector we can no longer afford, they are tinkering at the margins of the problem. They are so afraid of provoking a reaction from the inefficient, overpaid army of state workers that they are failing to take real action.

Instead of new stealth taxes and extra charges on private sector workers and their pension funds, the government should be cutting its spending much faster so it can give people an incentive to work harder and expand business.

The scale of the problem is staggering, and it's worth recalling how it happened.

Before the boom here really got going, Irish banks funded most of their lending the normal way, from deposits. Once the boom took off, however, that was too slow and too limiting, so the Irish banks started borrowing from other banks, mostly in Germany and France.

In 2003 foreign borrowing by Irish banks was below €15 billion. By the time the boom was peaking in 2007/’08 the Irish banks had borrowed €110 billion.

Most of this was loaned out to fund property speculation here in a boom that was obviously unsustainable. The European banks involved in the gamble, and the European Central Bank (ECB) which was supposed to be regulating banking in Europe, should now be sharing in the cost of the crash.

Instead of doing so, however, they have insisted on getting all of their money back, and the ECB has insisted that the Irish taxpayer must carry all of the cost.

That has placed a huge burden on our national finances since billions have to be diverted every year from anything productive into simply repaying our debts.

This month, for example, we have to repay €3 billion of around €30 billion in debts run up by Anglo Irish Bank which is now being wound up.
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Unless the government can cut some deal from the EU on the promissory notes involved, we will have to go on paying €3 billion a year every year for the next decade for the debts of a private bank that doesn't even exist anymore.

That ordinary Irish people have to carry the cost of the lunacy that went on in Irish banks during the boom makes no sense. Yet in the warped world of international finance this is accepted as justifiable, if regrettable.

To their shame, the present government, despite huffing and puffing during the election, seem to accept this as well.

The result is that a huge amount of money that could now be helping us rebuild our economy is instead being sent out of the country to repay the foreign banks that speculated on the Irish property boom.

Most of them have been paid off by now, and to do so the government here borrowed tens of billions from the ECB. That's a big part of why we needed the bailout.

The other half of the bailout was needed because once the property boom here collapsed tax revenue dried up, leaving a huge budget deficit. The rising number of people out of work and needing welfare made the situation even worse.

Also, state spending here during the boom went completely off the rails and we are now left with a system of high welfare and benefits payments of all kinds that people have come to expect but the country can no longer afford.

Spending on welfare and the health system here almost doubled during the boom. Adjusting that now with close to half a million people out of work is going to be very difficult. But it has to be done because we're still spending almost a third more than we raise in tax revenue.

Rather than getting lost in the billions, let me give you just one example of how far state benefits in Ireland are out of line with most other places.

One of the most sensitive subjects you can raise here is the old age pension. In Ireland, you get what they call the contributory old age pension at age 66. It's €230.30 a week, which adds up to €11,975 a year.

In Britain the old age pension adds up to £5,311 a year, equivalent to €6,357 a year. So the Irish state pension is almost twice as much as the U.K. state pension.

The average pay of state workers in Ireland increased by 60% between 2000 and 2009. As a result senior civil servants here are paid around double what their counterparts in other similarly sized countries in Europe earn. Teachers in Ireland, for example, earn almost a third more than their counterparts in the U.K.

Yet any suggestion that old age pensions or pay for teachers or nurses has to be reduced is greeted with fury here. Any attempt to do so is likely to end up in street protests which could quickly descend into Greek-style chaos.

Another huge burden being carried by the taxpayer here is the enormous cost of pensions for state workers, which are guaranteed and paid out of current tax revenue (or state borrowing). They don't depend on stock market performance like private pensions. They are pitched at around two-thirds of earnings.

In some sectors (like the police), state workers can get them at age 60 or even earlier. The cost runs into billions for taxpayers every year.

Yet there has been no reform of the system to reflect what has happened to pensions in the private sector.

Other inefficiencies and anomalies crop up regularly. Last weekend, for example, the lead story in The Irish Times revealed that workers in the state sector taking sick leave costs us over half a billion a year.

Workers in the state sector can take seven uncertified sick days in a 12-month period without losing any pay. Or in other words, they can take a long weekend once a month for seven months of the year. If they are on certified sick leave (they get their doctor to sign a form) they get full pay for six months and half pay after that.

No one is saying that people who are sick should not be supported, but clearly this system invites abuse.
Similarly, no one is saying that state welfare payments and benefits should be reduced below what is necessary, but the wide disparity between benefit levels in our system and in the U.K. needs to be explained.

All of this -- and it's no accident that our senior civil servants and politicians are major beneficiaries of the system as it is -- is a drain on what's left of our economy and a serious blockage to our recovery.

Until we change it and until we stand up to the EU on the bank debt issue, the long lines of young people here attending overseas jobs fairs won't be getting any shorter.

Time for Ireland to play hardball in Europe - Ireland's referendum on the European Fiscal Stability Treaty

United Left Alliance party members called on the Irish public to vote 'No'

The big news here last week was that we are to have a referendum on the European Fiscal Stability Treaty. Which will be about as exciting as watching paint dry. I bet you're really looking forward to the debate, just like me.

Will the Irish people vote yes? Will they vote no? Will it make any difference?

We'll be torturing ourselves with this stuff for the next couple of months. So before it gets too impenetrable and soporific, here's your easy-to-follow guide to what it's all about.

Why does Europe need a new fiscal treaty anyway? Mainly it's to reassure the Germans that the money they are pouring into bailing out bankrupt Eurozone countries like Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain won't vanish down the plughole with nothing to show for it.  It's all about saving the Eurozone and the euro as a currency.

What does the treaty do?  It ties the states in the Eurozone to financial rectitude in the future. Gone will be the days when politicians held on to power by promising voters all kinds of goodies and then borrowing huge amounts to pay for them. Irish politicians wrote the book on this -- they've been at it for years.  Which is why we now have a massive welfare state here that we can't afford and a resulting massive budget deficit that has to be bridged by an EU-IMF bailout because no one else will lend to us.

In future, Eurozone states will have to stick to a structural deficit of 0.5% of GDP -- the structural bit means that the calculation allows for the ups and downs of economic cycles.
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Or to put it simply, Eurozone states will effectively have to run balanced budgets.   If states can't raise the taxes, they don't spend the money.  Which will be a major shock for Irish politicians.

What about overall debt? The treaty will mean that states will have to get their national debt down to the already agreed level of 60% of GDP.  Before Ireland is out of this crisis we'll be around twice that level, so it will be years before we get there.

But we have to commit to working towards the target.  Mind you, unless we want to see vast amounts of our revenue being spent on interest for decades to come, this is what we need to do anyway.
So if the treaty makes sense, why is it so controversial?  That's because it's going to mean severe austerity here while we get our financial house in order.

But aren't we already suffering severe austerity?  You're right there.  It's cutbacks everywhere here at the moment, and that's going to continue for at least another three or four years.
So this treaty won't actually make much difference to us?  Right again.

The EU-IMF bailout program we are in commits us to getting our budget down to 3% by 2015.  Our budget deficit will be close to zero about five or six years from now.   It's the only way we're going to be able to get back into the financial markets so we can borrow for genuinely productive investment instead of day-to-day spending.

In the meantime we are going to have to cut state spending with a series of austerity budgets the like of which have never been experienced here before.

Is there anyway to avoid this?  Sorry, not a chance.  We're caught.

We have to stick with the program to get the bailout money for the next few years until we can balance our budget. Otherwise it would be financial cold turkey instantly, which could cause a total breakdown of society here.

So since we have to go through austerity anyway, should we all vote yes in the referendum?
Well, it's not as simple as that.  There are arguments in both directions.

For a start, there's the possibility (however remote) that the EU/IMF would turn off the bailout tap.  A bigger problem is that only states that sign up to the treaty will have access to the new European Stability Mechanism (the ESM), a massive permanent bailout fund set up to help Eurozone states in trouble; if we need a second bailout (and the ratings agency Moody's on Monday predicted that we will) then not having access to the ESM would be a disaster. All of which points to a yes vote.

But there are also reasons why a no vote makes sense.  For a start, this whole process we are in is a disgrace.   Part of the blame for the Irish financial crisis goes right back to the way the Eurozone was set up and the failure to complete the kind of fiscal structures that would have made the whole thing work.

Right through the boom here, when we should have been raising interest rates to calm things down, we were tied to the lower interest rates that suited Germany and so were imposed on the rest of Europe.

Then there's the culpability of the German and French banks that took a gamble on the Irish property boom by lending billions to the Irish banks and now want all their money back even though the property deals have collapsed -- and the EU and the ECB have made it a condition of us getting the bailout that none of our banks defaults on its debts to these bondholders.

As you may know, most of these bank bondholders, foolishly guaranteed by the Irish state in the autumn of 2008, have now been paid.  But to do so the Irish state has had to borrow billions and billions, and that debt is now being carried by the Irish taxpayer.   A big chunk of what we get in bailout funds goes right back again in debt repayments.

It's absolutely crazy when you think about it.  It's also unfair and unjust.  Why should the Irish taxpayer have to carry this enormous burden?

You can't get a straight answer from anyone in Europe because there isn't one.  What this referendum does is give the Irish voter the chance to protest against this terrible injustice.

An example of the injustice is the situation with the former Anglo Irish Bank, the small bank that became a big player by stoking the property boom here, acting illegally and recklessly, and was one of the main reasons the country is now bust.  The bank is now closed down, but the ECB is making us pay back all the money owed to its unguaranteed bondholders.

This has become a big issue here, with around €30 billion in promissory notes (IOUs signed by the government) involved.  We are due to pay this back at the rate of just over €3 billion a year for the next 10 years (and coincidentally €3 billion is roughly equivalent to the amount of painful cutbacks we have had to make here this year).

We are also paying a penal rate of interest on this debt (up to 8%), even though hundreds of billions in new money is now being pumped into banks across Europe by the ECB at a rate of around 1%.   This is so outrageous that it's beyond comment.
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One government minister here broke ranks last week and suggested that we should let Europe know that unless we get a deal on the €30 billion in promissory notes the Irish people are likely to vote no, no matter what the consequences.

That deal should include a big interest rate cut and/or a big capital write down.  All of which is a strong reason for voting no.

So far the Irish government are still being the good boys in Europe.   Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny has said that the two issues (the treaty and the promissory notes) must not be linked.

He says that the votes of the Irish people "cannot be bought" and that separate negotiations are taking place with the ECB about the promissory notes.  He's either a fool or else he's smarter than we think and he's playing a subtle game with Europe.

So what's likely to happen? It's too early to say.

An opinion poll last week showed that more people here are inclined to vote yes, but there is a very big number of people who have yet to decide.  If they don't see the EU playing fair and offering Ireland a deal in the coming weeks, they may well vote no in a couple of months when the referendum is held.

Does Europe care or will they just let us swing in the wind? Of course they care.  Any state falling out of the Eurozone will put the whole European integration project at risk.

Look at the lengths they have gone to in a probably futile attempt to keep Greece in the Eurozone.  They are even more desperate to keep Ireland in, which is why they altered the wording of the treaty a few weeks back in an attempt to avoid the necessity for a referendum here.

What happened 10 days ago was that the attorney general advised the government that a referendum was necessary anyway, because the proposed changes had a constitutional impact (we seem to be the only country in Europe where something like this cannot be implemented without a referendum).

There was some surprise at this, but in reality any attempt to introduce the treaty here without a referendum would have been challenged in the Supreme Court.

So a referendum it is. Which means we have our European masters by the liathroidi.  That's Irish for balls, in case you didn't know.

Why Enda Kenny needs to do more than positive thinking

Prime Minister Enda Kenny at the launch of the new PayPal jobs for Ireland announcement last week 

Positive thinking is good.  A positive attitude to life can help a person, a business -- or even a country -- accomplish a great deal.

Our leader, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny, certainly believes this.  He is Mr. Positivity.  He radiates it.  He's like a walking advert for the power of positive thinking.

In spite of this country's economy being in the blackest hole it's ever been in, the taoiseach has been rushing around for weeks now spreading positive vibes about Ireland.

A few weeks back he was over in London doing his power handshake with British Prime Minister David

Cameron on the steps of No. 10, exuding positivity.   Two weeks ago Enda was rolling out the green carpet here for the Chinese vice president, and he's off to China himself in a few weeks.  

Over their three-day visit here, he filled the Chinese with positivity about Ireland and how we're recovering from our little blip and are going to become a great country again in a year or two.

In the past three weeks, Enda's also been over in Berlin sharing his positivity with Angela Merkel, and in Rome sprinkling his positive gold dust around Prime Minister Mario Draghi, like Tinkerbell.

Draghi was so energized that he returned Enda's good vibes by asserting that Ireland was an example to the rest of the struggling countries in Europe -- like his own country, Italy -- that austerity can work.  

This week Enda's in Brussels at a meeting of the leaders from the 27 EU countries and he will be Mr. Positivity again, emphasizing that we are sticking with the program and that things are starting to look up even though we have more years of austerity to get through.

No doubt there will be lots of patronizing talk from other leaders about how mature and wise the Irish people are to have swallowed so much austerity without losing their heads like those crazy Greeks.  
We'll be held up like a beacon for the rest of Europe.  Let's just hope the little love bunny Sarkozy refrains from patting Enda on the head this time!

As you guys over there know, the taoiseach has also been sprinkling the positive fairy dust in the U.S. as well.  He was at the Bill Clinton event to woo the heavy hitters in American business to invest here.  A week or so before that he was over in the U.S. on another trip and, of course, he will be back over with you for St. Patrick's Day.

There's no escape!  That stern smile and the power speech will insist again and again that Ireland has turned the corner, that we're back on track, that the austerity program is working and that we're open for business.

To add to the glow, in the past week or two there have been major job announcements here by foreign companies, with PayPal leading the bunch by announcing an extra thousand jobs for Ireland.  It's all positive!

Well, not really.  We all know why Enda is doing it.  But it's a teeny bit irritating for all of us back who have to live the reality in Ireland while he's chasing round the world at a dizzying rate being super-positive.

We all know about the power of positive thinking.  But it's possible to have too much positive thinking.  So here's a reality check.

The fact is that the economy here is still on the floor.  Growth here this year will be almost non-existent.  Maybe a bit over half of 1% if we're lucky.  Not the 1.3% that the government has been talking about.

That's going to impact on our tax revenue and therefore our ability to stick with the deficit target for this year.

Cue more cutbacks and even lower spending in a domestic economy that is already down in the dumps.
Instead of dropping significantly, unemployment here will stay above 14% this year.  To add to our troubles, our export markets in Europe will be sluggish this year as growth there slows to a near stop.

So all in all, there's not a lot to be positive about there.  And, while new jobs here are always welcome and needed badly, as far as those new jobs in PayPal are concerned it's not quite as wonderful as the “1,000 New Jobs” headlines suggested. How many of those jobs will go to the unemployed young Irish remains to be seen. The PayPal jobs need language skills, you see, because they will be supporting customers in 14

European languages from the new facility here. As you may know, the language skills of most Irish school and college graduates are very poor. In comparison with most EU countries where young people speak their own language, English, and often at least one other European language, the vast majority of Irish kids just have second rate French.

Even in the U.K., including Northern Ireland, they are better at foreign languages than we are here.  

You may have wondered why the new PayPal plant will be in Dundalk.   It's in the south of Ireland and therefore qualifies for our very low corporation tax.  And it's close to the border with the North so it can draw workers with better language skills from up in the North as well.

There will also be young workers from other European countries who will come in here to fill some of the PayPal jobs.  One estimate I saw reckoned that maybe a third of the workers will end up being from the south of Ireland.  It will be interesting to see if that turns out to be accurate.

Staying with the language problem, during the Chinese visit someone here mentioned on TV that our kids should be learning Mandarin in school.  Of course English is the world’s business language and lots of the young Chinese learn it (like a lot of Irish graduates, a nephew of mine is currently in Shanghai teaching English).

But being able to speak Chinese would open so many doors for us.  Again and again during the Chinese visit the importance of personal contact and being able to speak some Chinese was emphasized.

But Chinese is way beyond us.  The vast majority of young people here can't even manage a single European language.

It all comes back to our schools and the amount of time wasted -- yes, wasted -- learning the dead language Irish.  In primary schools across Europe, most kids are taught another European language other than their own.

From an early age the French kids are learning English and/or German, the Dutch kids are learning French and/or English and so on.  Most of the college students you meet backpacking here in summer speak English and probably two European languages, including their own. The secret is they start young, as soon as they enter primary school.

Meanwhile, no classes in European languages are provided in Irish schools.  Instead the kids in Ireland aged from four to 11 are forced to learn Irish, with at least one class in our "first official language" every school day.  

Enda can rush around and be as positive as he likes.  But he needs to start doing practical things to cut through the legacy nonsense that is holding us back, on things like languages.  And languages are far from the only legacy disadvantage we have.

As well as that, he needs to do something practical about our debt, like renegotiating it, because just like those not-so crazy Greeks, realistically we're never going to be able to pay it back.

Against that truth, all this Road Runner positivity the taoiseach is zooming around other countries doing is just plain silly.

Time for Ireland to start thinking like the Chinese

China Vice President Xi Jinping with an Irish coffee on a farm in Co. Clare on Sunday

There was a great headline in one of the Irish newspapers last Saturday: “The Chinese Are Coming, Look Busy!”

And over the following three days as China's Vice President and dear leader in waiting Xi Jinping visited Ireland, we did our best.

In fact we were extremely busy.  Not making iPods or any of the other myriad products that the poor Chinese who slave away at Foxconn in China produce for the rest of the world.  No, we were busy kissing ass.

From the moment his plane hit the tarmac at Shannon after arriving from the U.S. and his visit there (where to his credit Joe Biden laid a few truths on him), we gave the poor man no peace.  It was fawning obsequiousness all the way as we relentlessly rattled him through every Irish cliché in the book.

Jinping’s three-day visit had official Ireland pulling out all the stops.  It was a blur of the Cliffs of Moher, Irish coffee, bagpipes, a visit to a farm, harpists at Bunratty Castle, the proverbial pint, a state dinner in Dublin Castle, swinging a hurley, a Gaelic football match at Croke Park, even Riverdance.  You can be sure he slept for a day or two when he got back home after all that.

So why Ireland?   Why would the top man in a country of 1,300 million people want to spend so much time in a country of, er, five million?

According to Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny and his ministers, it’s because China holds us in such high regard.  And because we’re such an important player in Europe, of course!

Some cynics suggested that the real reason was because his jumbo had to refuel somewhere for the long haul back to China.   Other cynics suggested it was because he knows we’re so desperate he was certain of getting an ecstatic, unquestioning welcome here.

That was not something that could be guaranteed elsewhere in Europe where all kinds of issues might have been thrown at him, like human rights abuses, the lack of democracy in China and the decades of suffering in Tibet.
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Even more embarrassing might have been outraged protests in London or Paris or Berlin at the refusal of
China at the UN Security Council to agree to measures to stop the butcher Assad from murdering his own people in Syria.  The risk of meeting such protests  had to be avoided at all costs.

So where could the Beloved Leader In Waiting be sure that the huge media contingent traveling with him would get lots of shots of him meeting adoring people who behaved as though he was as magnetic a personality as Bill Clinton?

In Ireland, of course, with the added bonus of a backdrop of spectacular scenery.  There would be endless shots of him looking presidential and wildly popular to send home to China, proving that we Europeans just love him to bits.

We’ve a lot to answer for.  But at least we’ve got a good excuse.  We’re desperate to get investment and jobs and we’ll do anything to get favored access to the Chinese market.

All that stuff about the Chinese keeping their currency artificially low and screwing up the world economy, about massive trade imbalances, about stealing intellectual property from the west, about obscene pay rates and working conditions for their workers in factories that are bigger than an Irish town, that’s all for someone else to worry about.

Jinping can smile and wave and be as inscrutable as he likes here.  We’ll pour the pints and have the craic and take what we can get.

Apart from rolling out the green carpet for him, we put on a big show to demonstrate what a great place Ireland is to do business and what great products we have to offer.

The most important event during the visit was the China Ireland Trade Forum which gave Irish entrepreneurs and movers and shakers a chance to rub shoulders with and make pitches to the 200 or so top level people who were in Jinping’s entourage.

That went on for hours in the beautiful King’s Hospital complex in Dublin, and everyone who was anyone in Irish business was there, with a waiting list of entrepreneurs and exporters trying to get tickets.

To be fair to Kenny, that may yet be quite productive and he’s off to China in a month with a big Irish business delegation to keep the doors open.  See no evil, hear no evil can have its rewards.

There are huge opportunities for little Ireland in the fast developing Chinese market, of course, especially as the Chinese middle class expands and wants things like quality food products, drinks, prestige brands and so on.  

But there is another way we can benefit from a relationship with China, something that was barely mentioned here over the past few days.  If we could suck up a fraction of their entrepreneurial zeal we would be much better off.

Coincidentally, a friend of mine who is in the housewares business was at the annual homeware trade fair in Frankfurt two weeks ago.   This huge exhibition covers an area the size of several football stadiums full of stands showing all the stuff that fills our homes.  Most of the thousands of trade stands in the huge halls were manned by Chinese showing goods that were Made in China.
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China doesn’t just make most of the world’s electrical and electronic goods (all those tablets and e-readers and iPods and phones and TVs and all the rest of it).  They also make a lot of the other manufactured goods as well.

At the homeware fairs you can get everything from Christmas decorations to chandeliers, all made in China.
But it was not just the mind blowing range of stuff that the Chinese were showing that impressed my business friend.

If a buyer wanted something in a different material, shape, size or color, that was no problem.  Different electronics or mechanics?  No problem.

At one point my friend produced pictures he had taken from magazines and explained that he wanted something like that but tweaked in various ways he specified.  Ten days after the fair finished they were pinging him emails from China, showing pictures and specs of what he had asked for and offering to send samples of prototypes for inspection.   They also quoted killer prices per thousand or ten thousand.

This is what a lot of people in the west don’t get about China.  We’re so used to seeing that Made in China stamp on everything that we think there must be a masterplan, with Jinping and his identikit buddies directing the whole thing.

That’s a common misconception.  Not everything is made in town-size factories run by Foxconn, where Apple produces its sophisticated products.

What China’s success is built on is small businesses, hundreds of thousands of them, all hungry for orders and clever and flexible enough to do things faster and cheaper than anyone else.

We look at some of the consumer goods that come out of China these days and we imagine that they must be made in mega-factories with armies of cheap labor.  The truth is that a lot of what we buy comes from small plants that are no different in scale or sophistication than in most other places, including Ireland.

Yes the cheap labor is a big factor and the endless supply of it that is available from the hundreds of millions still in rural China.  But all that would be useless without the entrepreneurial drive that so many Chinese have, particularly in the small business sector.

Entrepreneurial drive.  That’s what we’re missing in Ireland.

Not completely, because there are notable exceptions, like all the small new software companies.

But as a nation we’re not risk takers or innovators.  Most of us work for someone (and of course too many of us work for the state).  Maybe it has something to do with our colonial history.

The scale of the FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) sector here is seen as one of our great successes in recent decades.   We attract big multi-national companies from around the world, particularly the U.S.  They bring us tens of thousands of jobs (like the announcement this week that PayPal is bringing another thousand jobs here).

That’s all good.  But why is it always someone from somewhere else who comes in and starts a factory here?

Why can’t we do it ourselves?

We’re always boasting about our young graduates and how bright and well educated they are.  But we rarely hear any of them say, “I’m going to work for myself, I’ve got an idea about starting a new business.”

A lot of this goes back to the culture in our schools, much of which is still rooted in the classical education tradition of the last century.  The teaching of business, a relatively recent innovation in the curriculum here, is poor.  The textbooks are written by teachers, none of whom has ever run a business.
And the system is overseen by civil servants in the Department of Education who have never dirtied their hands in the world of commerce.

In universities here it’s much the same.  All the kids aim at getting jobs in big corporations.  Actually starting and growing a business is seen as too difficult or not worth the effort.

The Chinese think differently. We need to do the same.

Irish public sector workers take money and run

Senior public workers such as members of the Garda are taking rich pensions 

Here's one that could make the Guinness Book of Records in the Most Stupid Government Decisions section (and if there isn't such a section, Ireland urgently needs one).

Or it could be included in that famous old newspaper feature Ripley's Believe It or Not.  (I used to love reading that as a kid, because it came up with the most bizarre, ludicrous stuff you thought could never be true and, of course, it always was.)

Well, I hereby nominate Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny and his government for Ripley's Believe It or Not on the basis of their ridiculous method of reducing the size of the state payroll here.

We have to cut the state payroll because our masters in the EU and IMF have made it a condition of continuing to give us the bailout money.  On this issue, at least, they are right because we just cannot afford the cost of all the state workers we have and the high pay rates many of them are on.  
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Ireland is still spending like in the boom time, but our revenue has collapsed in the bust over the past four or five years. The resulting huge gap in the state finances -- together with the cost of our banking collapse -- has made our country virtually bankrupt.

To bridge the spending/revenue gap we have to borrow billions every year, and we're in the IMF/EU program because no one else will lend that money to us.

The way for us to get out of this situation is to close our enormous budget deficit over the next few years.  A key part of that will be cutting the cost of the public service (workers paid by the state) which is more than one third of total state spending.

It's a huge annual bill, and balancing the budget won't be possible unless we reduce it substantially.  So it involves reducing the cost of our hospitals, schools, the army, the police, the civil service and the vast number of people on the state payroll working in various quangos and state bodies that you never hear about.  

That's the problem.   There are basically two ways of delivering a solution.  We can cut pay and pension levels in the state sector or we can cut the number of people on the state payroll (or we can do a combination of both).

It's not going to be easy.  After some minor pay cuts for state workers were implemented a couple of years ago, the government and the unions made a deal which ruled out any further cuts in pay in return for a no strike agreement.

This was called the Croke Park Agreement (because the negotiations were held in conference rooms at the famous football stadium), and the idea was to make the state sector more efficient and deliver the required cost savings without any further pay cuts or any forced job losses.

This was an extremely good deal for the state workers.  The rest of the economy was (and still is) deeply depressed, with many private sector workers having their pay and pensions slashed and many others losing their jobs, leading to a huge jump in the number of people on welfare (unemployment here is now 14.3%).  

Meanwhile, as all this mayhem was going on in the real economy, the state workers were completely protected. Their pay could not be cut.  Their generous pensions (paid for out of current taxation and/or borrowing) were secure.

And, to add insult to injury, they have been dragging their heels on the promised work changes that were supposed to deliver big savings to the state.  Every change in work practices, flexibility or redeployment that has been proposed seems to be a problem for them.  We're still waiting for any significant reform.

This is where we get to the Believe It or Not bit.  With the IMF/EU looking for action on our huge state sector bill, the government came up with a plan, and it's so ridiculous that it deserves a place in Ripley.
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Anyone with any sense would have started with the pay and pensions in the public service.   It's very simple -- they are too high so they need to be cut, as they have been in the rest of the economy.

Certainly there is room to cut.  Teachers, police, medical staff and many others earn more here than their counterparts do in the U.K.  In many cases the pay gap is 10% to 20%, or even more.

In the middle to higher ranks of the civil service, and for example among the top medical people like hospital consultants, the gap is even wider between us and other, much bigger, EU countries.

The unions always point to the majority of state workers and make the point that they are on modest pay (less than €40,000 a year) and have already taken cuts to help fund their pensions.  But it's not as simple as that.
First of all they have job security, which these days in Ireland is priceless.  And secondly, if you add in the real funding cost of their guaranteed pensions, their true pay levels would be about €20,000 a year more.  Private sector workers have to bear full pension costs, so why not state workers?

All of which shows that, in spite of the publicity from the unions, the truth is there is room for significant cuts in pay and pension levels in the state sector here.

The other reason why this is the correct approach is that it would allow the state to retain the maximum number of state workers to maintain the level of public services that we have.  You cut pay, but you keep the staff numbers.  That's what the government should be doing.

It should be telling the unions that the Croke Park agreement is history because it was a mistake and we're in a new situation.  But instead of that the government has opted to leave pay untouched and to get numbers down.

Because the Croke Park agreement rules out any forced job losses, this has to be done on a voluntary basis.  And this is where we get into the Ripley situation.

To encourage state workers to go the government recently announced an early retirement scheme, with a big carrot attached.

If workers accepted before the end of this month, their pensions would be based on pay levels before the cuts two years ago.   This would make them substantially more valuable, about 15% higher than if a state worker stayed on to the normal retirement age.

Also, the pensions would be based on final salary, not average lifetime earnings, which will be the system in
future.  And on top of that there would be large tax-free lump sums paid out to retiring public servants.

For people with five to 10 years to go, or for people with other plans, it was a no brainer.  So after a slow start there has been a surge in applications for the scheme.

With less than two weeks to go, over 8,000 state workers have signed up.  They will be getting an average lump sum of around €80,000 each, although many senior people are set to get even more, with retiring high-ranking Gardai (police) for example getting an average of €107,000 each.   The final cost to the state this year in lump sum payments is likely to be at least €700 million.  

Because the unions made it a condition of the scheme that it must be open to everyone in the public service, there is no restriction on who can apply. Anyone who does apply must be given the deal.

So the hope that the scheme would allow us to get rid of a lot of unproductive people in traditional civil service administration roles has not turned out to be the case.  And when you think about it, if you have a nice easy job, with a fat salary and a good pension to come, why should you apply?

In fact a lot of those applying have turned out to be people in front line, high stress positions, surgeons and midwives, senior police officers and senior teachers, and many others in key roles.

One of the most high profile was Paul Appleby, the head of the Office of Corporate Enforcement, who is directing the investigation into the former Anglo Irish Bank, the bank that played a major role in bringing the country to its knees and where all kinds of reckless and illegal activity was happening.

That investigation is now reaching its climax after several years, so the idea that Appleby would be given a big payout to retire early and walk away caused a public outcry here that was so loud that the minister had to step in and Appleby is now staying on for a while, hopefully until the Anglo probe is complete.

Then there is the case of the senior Gardai.  So many senior officers have decided to take the deal that there is real concern now that nailing the bad boys won't be as effective in the next few years.

With more violence, murders, drug problems and ordinary crime as the recession bites, it's not a good time to lose so many from the top tier in our police.

Probably the one that caused most alarm was the case of the biggest hospital in Limerick, where 47 midwives (out of 200) are leaving.  With our birth rate still very high, these are high pressure jobs needing experienced staff.

The hospital serves a wide area in Munster.  No one knows where the new midwives are to come from or what's going to happen.

How can the government have got it so wrong?  It seems the best and most vital people in the public service are lining up to take the money and run. The pen pushers and keyboard tappers will be left behind.

In the private sector when companies have voluntary retirement schemes, the company decides who gets the deal and key people are often refused.  The skill balance and productivity of the organization is protected.   What the government is doing ignores this completely; it is both stupid and irresponsible.

There is also a big question mark over whether it can really deliver the massive saving the IMF/EU want.  Since many of those who are leaving are skilled people (like midwives) they have to be replaced.

In the short term, many will be given the deal and then be taken back for a while, like the teachers of classes who are doing the Leaving Cert (high school leaving exam) this year.

The government has made such a mess of this that Kenny has announced "transitional teams" to oversee the change in places like hospitals.  But everyone here knows he is making it up as he goes along.

There appears to be zero planning.  The only policy appears to be not to upset the unions because the government is terrified of precipitating a Greek style confrontation on the streets.

Three or four thousand nurses and doctors are getting out of the health service.   Around 2,000 teachers are leaving schools.  So it won't be a good time to get sick or for kids to be looking for extra help with classwork.

The government insists that the level of public services won't be affected.  "We have to do more with less" is the catch phrase of the day.

Meanwhile, the remaining state workers will still be on pay and pensions that are much higher than in the U.K.

Calling Mr. Ripley ....  
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